The Advocate » The Wandering Musicologist by Naomi Perley

Martin Bresnick’s Presentation

Naomi Perley — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:31:52 +0000

On the last day of the festival, Martin Bresnick presented on his own music, in the manner of the other principal composers. Some composers are quite shy to talk about their work, for obvious reasons: they don’t want to reveal their “tricks”, or they don’t want to share a private or personal inspiration behind a piece, and so on. Bresnick, however, dove right into the substance of his work: why he composes, how he composes, and what his pieces are all about.

Bresnick started off quite seriously by admonishing the composers and performers that music is dangerous and powerful, and that one must always treat it as a life and death matter. One must always do music at the highest level; in a sense, he said, being a musician is similar to being called to priesthood.

This philosophy guides Bresnick’s own work. He brings everything he can to his music, to the point that he considers his own artistic aims to be ”excessively ambitious.” In his works, he strives to be personally expressive and philosophical, and to create architectonic forms.

That last aim – creating architectonic forms - was one of the recurring themes throughout Bresnick’s presentation. Bresnick said outright at the beginning of his talk that he felt that many of the student composers at Music10 neglected formal integrity in favour of the surface elements of a composition. His point of view provided a nice counterpoint to those of Hartke and Hoffman, who discussed primarily surface elements, such as orchestration, and the important role that intuition plays when they compose. Intuition plays a less significant role in Bresnick’s compositional process, as he does not rely on it when he works out the formal elements of a composition.

This is not to say that the surface of a composition is unimportant to Bresnick – as he put it, “Nobody fell in love with their partner because they have beautiful ribs in their chest!” However, Bresnick urged the composers at Music10 to try to strike a balance in their works between creating a beautiful surface, and ensuring that there is a lasting structure holding that surface up.

After this weighty introduction, Bresnick expounded on his aesthetic philosophy by means of analysing several pieces. He began with Brahms’s Intermezzo in B minor, op. 119, no. 1, which has long served as a model for him, and then discussed three of his own works: Bird as Prophet, *** (the so-called “Three-Star” trio for viola, clarinet, and piano), and My Twentieth Century. (The last two were performed at Music10.)

I was especially happy that he talked about My Twentieth Century, as the piece had had quite a profound effect on me at eighth blackbird’s concert on Monday night. He discussed both the extramusical significance of the work – its meaning – and its musical structure. This work is Bresnick’s artistic response to the twentieth century as a whole – it is, in essence, a protest piece. In between playing their instruments, the musicians take turns reciting the lines of a poem written by a friend of Bresnick’s, the poet Tom Andrews. The poem starts out sounding like a bittersweet reminiscence of the twentieth century, but gradually turns darker, as the line “My brother died in the twentieth century” comes back again and again. The twentieth century, in Bresnick’s opinion, was a disaster – everyone’s brother died in some useless, human-caused way.

In discussing his decision to have the instrumentalists read lines of the poem, Bresnick referred to Charles Ives, whom he called a ”democratic” composer. By this, he meant that Ives allowed for, and encouraged, imperfections in his music, such as wrong notes and off rhythms. In the same way, Bresnick wanted to demonstrate that music was permeable to imperfections by encouraging the players to speak in their own voices, regardless of what kind of accent they have, or how poorly they speak English. Personally, I find works like My Twentieth Century fascinating because they allow an element of theatricality to emerge that is usually prevalent only in vocal music, rather than purely instrumental music. I would have never thought of it in the way that Bresnick described it – as “democratic” – if I were left to my own devices. Again, one of the perks of getting to hear the composer himself speak!

On a purely musical level, Bresnick discussed the ways in which he organised both the rhythm of and the pitches of My Twentieth Century. As I said in my review of the piece, there is a driving ostinato that runs throughout the work. Apparently, the rhythmic patterns he used are loosely based on those found in Balkan dances. His goal in using these types of rhythms throughout the piece was to give it a dancelike, obsessive quality, thus tying his work to the age-old, mythical totentanz (“dance of death”). Although he employs asymmetrical meters such as 5/16 or 7/16 throughout the work, he structured the piece quite rigorously into sections that are each 60 sixteenth notes long. During the sections when the instrumentalists recite the lines of the poem, however, the meter evens out into 12/16; so the spoken sections each consist of 5 measures of 12/16. Thus, he uses regular and irregular meter to distinguish between the purely instrumental sections of the piece, and those in which the instrumentalists speak.

Bresnick’s approach to pitches in My Twentieth Century was similarly systematic. Each of the instrumentalists only plays in sections, as they take turns reciting lines of the poem as well. So, any time that a particular instrument plays for a section, it only plays four pitches; moreover, all of these four-note groups are symmetrical.

The most fascinating bit of symmetry that Bresnick discussed had to do with the pitch centre of the piece. Earlier in the presentation, Bresnick had been talking about the importance of the interval of the tritone in his works; it turns out that My Twentieth Century is no exception. The whole work is centred around the pitch C sharp, although all twelve notes are used at some point in the piece. The one pitch that is reserved till the end of the piece is G, which lies a tritone away from C sharp. Bresnick introduces the pitch G at a crucial moment of the work, at the recitation of the lines: ”There was something very obvious in the twentieth century / I could never see or understand.”

After hearing Bresnick speak, I understand why he takes Brahms as one of his models. Just as Brahms did over a century ago, Bresnick strives in his compositions to unite a rigorous structure with deep, vitally important meaning, the emotional climaxes of his work coinciding with the formal ones. What type of music could be more satisfying, and more necessary, to discuss and to perform than this?

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My 5 picks

Naomi Perley — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:17:16 +0000

The second week of Music10 flew by. Sorry not to have posted as things were happening, but rest assured, now that it’s over, I will keep trying to digest everything I experienced in blog format over the next few days.

Most of my time last week was consumed by rehearsing for, performing in, and listening to the three concerts of the student composers’ new works. Over the course of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings, I listened to my fellow performers premiere over 20 new works written by the student composers expressly for this festival, and I performed myself in 3 works. How can I possibly sum up everything I heard??

Well, eighth blackbird suggested a way to me, by instituting a bit of a competition: at the end of the third concert, each performer and composer got to vote for their 5 favourite pieces; the two pieces with the most votes would be performed again at the final concert on Friday evening – kind of a democaratic encore. So, instead of trying to discuss everything I heard in all three nights, I’ll just tell you a bit about the five pieces that I voted for, in no particular order.

Jenny Olivia Johnson – now is the blue (clarinet, cello, piano, electronics)

This was the only student work to feature electronics, which Jenny herself manipulated. Before the performance, she commented that the work was inspired by a 3am drive in rural Massachusetts, listening to the music of Samuel Barber on the car radio. The electronics evoked the sounds of a night drive – birds, crickets, and other nocturnal murmurs. The influence of Barber’s style on Jenny’s instrumental writing was palpable – not only when she quoted his music directly, but also in her use of lush, beautiful harmonies.

Wenhui Xie, After . . . (clarinet, violin, percussion, piano)

Wenhui’s found the inspiration for her quartet in the collection of short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami titled After the Quake. This collection of short stories features characters who lived far from the Kobe earthquake of 1995 but whose lives were altered by the quake nonetheless. Wenhui’s quartet drifted from one gesture to another, alternating between soft tremors and moments of terror. She created an atmosphere of suspense that had me completely engaged throughout her piece.

Paul Kerekes, Hail (flute, cello, piano)

While composing this trio, Paul had in mind the admittedly bizarre image of being in a sculpture garden during a hailstorm. The image behind the piece mattered less in Paul’s trio, however – the truly remarkable thing about his piece was how well it held together on purely musical grounds. At the heart of the work was a pretty basic, quasi-minimalist ostinato, that kept returning. Yet Paul highlighted in his piece the contrasts possible from this small amount of material: the opening section was quite lively, while the second part of the piece presented the same basic material in a much more subdued manner.

Christopher Stark, Stars in Dead Reflection (clarinet, double bass, percussion, piano)

Chris’s piece was the last student work to be performed. Yet after three nights of listening to works by the student composers, this work still managed to grab my attention. I made an impulse decision to add it to my “five”, even though I had already planned out what five pieces I would vote for. He created a beautiful world of sounds that just drew me into his work.

Michael Ippolito, Nocturne (flute, violin, piano)

Michael’s piece is the only one on this list that I performed in. It was a very challenging piece to perform, but the musical payoff was huge. The piece begins with a slow section in which Michael interweaves motives from Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat Major, op. 9, no. 2, with a haunting melody of his own. The diabolically fast middle section climaxes with a return to Michael’s haunting melody, now played fortissimo. The piece ends with quotations from the Chopin Nocturne, now even more remote than they were in the beginning.

And the winners are . . .

One of the pieces I voted for won: Paul Kereke’s Hail. No surprise really, I think everyone found it to be easy to connect with on a first listen.

The other piece that won was Amy Kirsten’s L’ange pale, for soprano, flute, and percussion. Immediately after it was performed, people began speculating that Amy’s extremely theatrical work would win. Her piece set a French poem, but it was by no means a straightforward song with accompaniment. She took the poetry apart syllable by syllable, and made both the singer and the instrumentalists play around with all the possible sounds that each syllable could generate. All of the performers in Amy’s piece really got into this rather unusual text-setting, and gave a very convincing performance.

So what drew me to the pieces that I picked for my top five? The pieces I chose all have a few traits in common. First of all, these were all pieces that managed to keep my attention throughout, and that I could make sense of as I listened to them for the first (and only!) time – so the structure and the dramatic pacing worked pretty well in all of these works. Second, they all featured a lot of very beautiful sonorities – sorry to say it, but at the end of the day I still like to hear a few pleasing, (post)romantic harmonies somewhere along the way. Finally, I gravitated towards pieces that had some interesting contrasts built in – the different sections in Paul and Michael’s pieces, the soft tremors and loud crashes of Wenhui’s – without being contrasting to the point of distraction.

Is this the beginning of some sort of an aesthetic manifesto? I guess, for now, I’ll just keep listening . . .

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The AMAZINGNESS that is eighth blackbird in concert

Naomi Perley — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:17:59 +0000

eighth blackbird just performed an incredible concert here at Music10. This concert was devoted to works by the three principal composers that I mentioned in my last post: Joel Hoffman, Stephen Hartke, and Martin Bresnick. The whole concert was good, congratulations to all involved, etc., etc., but the standout works of the night were, undoubtedly, Hartke’s Meanwhile: Incidental Music to an Imaginary Puppet Play and Bresnick’s My 20th Century. The two works, as staged by eighth blackbird, would seem to warrant the term “music drama” more than anything Wagner ever wrote, if only that term weren’t so fraught.

Every season, eighth blackbird completely memorises a work and choreographs it; Meanwhile is one of these works. Before composing the work, Stephen Hartke looked up clips of different types of Asian puppet theatre on the internet. He said to me after the concert that he basically took on the role of “fake ethnomusicologist” in this piece, and created new instruments that he thought would be appropriate for some kind of puppet theatre. I think Hartke summed up the piece best when he told the audience before the performance that the instrumentalists in this piece narrate some kind of story, but he’s not sure what that story may be. Throughout the performance, the members of eighth blackbird moved around the stage, acting with their instruments and with each other as much as playing. Here are some photos:

Look ma, no music! Lisa played one of Hartke's "fake ethnomusicologist" instruments for a large part of the piece, in addition to her usual instrument, the piano.

Nick rocking out on the cello (apologies for the blurriness)

This was a really intense moment

So was this

Martin Bresnick’s My 20th Century was my favourite work of the night. It sets a poem by a close friend of his, Tom Anderson; you can read the whole poem on Bresnick’s website: http://www.martinbresnick.com/programnotes/mytwentieth.htm . Bresnick doesn’t set the poem to music in the sense that someone sings the text; rather, the music that he composed surrounds the poem, which is recited by the members of eighth blackbird, stanza by stanza, at significant moments throughout the piece.

Before the performance, Bresnick told the audience that the poem was at times funny and at times deeply meaningful. This is how I feel about Bresnick’s piece, as well. The work starts with an energetic, driving ostinato that is catchy enough in its own right, but accrues layers of meaning and beauty as Bresnick transforms it throughout the piece. Also breathtaking are the moments when the ostinato drops out altogether.

Here is a shot from My 20th Century. Michael and Matthew are reciting lines of the poem to each other while the others play.

It was so inspiring to get to see eighth blackbird play together in the midst of these crazy two weeks of rehearsing with them, eating with them, hanging out with them. They are an incredible group of performers, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn with them and to get to know them in such a unique setting.

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Composers’ Presentations

Naomi Perley — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:38:09 +0000

The other side of Music10 – the composing side – revolves around the festival’s principal composers: Joel Hoffman, Stephen Hartke, and Martin Bresnick. These three composers give presentations on their music and masterclasses in which they critique the student composers’ works, and eighth blackbird performs works by each of the resident composers in various concerts.

Stephen Hartke presented on his own music Tuesday evening, and Joel Hoffman presented on Friday (Martin Bresnick presents later this week). Both of the composers discussed and played recordings of several of their own works.

The part of Hartke’s presentation that I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Tituli, a work he composed in 1999 for the Hilliard Ensemble, a violinist, and two percussionists. The work is based on some of the oldest surviving Latin texts: fragments of inscriptions found on everything from jars used in religious ceremonies to shop signs. He discussed not only the circumstances of his life that led him to want to compose a piece based on these texts, but also how these experiences affected his aesthetic approach to the texts.

Hartke first got the idea for the piece while he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Apparently, the Academy, through its connections to various academic circles, organises trips for its scholars to archaeological sites that are closed to the public. Hartke said that the idea of people visiting the ruins, looking at what is left of them, imagining a monumental structure that used to stand in that spot but no longer does, inspired not only his choice of texts but also his approach in setting the texts to music. He sought to compose a piece that similarly was made up of fragments, recreating in sound the effect of looking at these incomplete ruins.

I also enjoyed hearing what Hartke had to say about orchestration. One of the things I have learned at Music10 is that composers discuss orchestration and timbre in far greater detail, and in far more practical terms, than any musicologists or theorists that I know. So naturally, one of the students’ questions toward the end of his presentation had to deal with his choice of instruments. Hartke tends to compose pieces for very unconventional groupings – I believe the point in the presentation when he began discussing orchestration was just after he played an excerpt from his oratorio, scored for soprano, four flutes, four guitars, and four bassoons. He said that in order to get his students to think critically about different instruments’ capabilities, he encourages them to perform thought experiments. For example: if you have two notes, and you want them to be played by a flute and an oboe, how would the specific overtones of each instrument affect the composite sound of the two notes together, if the oboe played the higher and the flute the lower note, or vice versa?

Hoffman began his presentation by talking about a “radical shift” in his compositional style that began about ten months ago. He said that he felt the need for a completely different approach to timbre, and especially to the use of silence. In his own words, before this shift, the silence in his pieces would be carved out of sound; now, he is carving sound out of silence, sometimes composing only one sonority for every ten or twenty seconds of silence. I was impressed that he would talk so candidly to all of the students about what must be a very personal and difficult process to undertake at this point in his career.

Although the two composers talked about quite different topics, one idea that recurred throughout both of their presentations was the importance of intuition. Hartke said that he didn’t really think about form before composing, but rather allowed the form to emerge from the materials he was working with. He also said that he didn’t much care to “justify” his choice of notes at any particular moment. As he put it: “You can justify anything in music by saying ‘this note is here because it is not over there!’ ” Hoffman came back to this idea in his own presentation when discussing his recent stylistic shift. He said he had no real explanation or justification for his new approach to composition, but at the same time, he said that he absolutely had to do it. Both agreed that the point of learning the craft of composition and studying the music of other composers was to make it possible to compose using “informed intuition” – and as Hoffman and Hartke have matured, they have both relied increasingly on their own intuition.

As great as performing all this new music is, I think my favourite part of the festival so far is gaining these kinds of insights into the world of composition.

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“Composer or performer?”

Naomi Perley — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:06:14 +0000

For the last three days, this phrase has become just as routine as “What is your name?” and “Nice to meet you”; however, it causes me a great deal more grief than these pleasantries ever have. I am definitely not a composer; that part of the binary is pretty easy to square away. But do I dare to call myself a performer?

I am currently participating, apparently as a performer, in Music10, a two-week-long festival of contemporary music held at the Hindemith Foundation Music Centre in Blonay, Switzerland. The goal of the festival is to bring together young composers and performers – thus the all-important question, “Composer or performer?” The composers write pieces for the performers beforehand; the performers put on several concerts dedicated to these new works at the end of the festival.

The glue holding everything together is eighth blackbird, an ensemble that has nearly reached rock-star status among contemporary-music enthusiasts (or maybe just in my own mind). Each piece that gets performed features a member of eighth blackbird, who plays together with the younguns. In other words, rather than having private lessons with one of them, or jostling for a spot in a masterclass, you get to play with them – to work with them every day as equals (well…equals?).

But let’s return to the question of the week – “Composer or performer?”

My major in college was music history; I’m currently pursuing a PhD in musicology at the Graduate Center. Although it’s never been my main occupation, performance has somehow managed to lurk in the dark corners of my life. I assumed that when I began grad school, my double life – musicologist by day, pianist by night – would end. But in the months before I began to study at CUNY, I found myself auditioning to study piano with Ursula Oppens, who was about to begin teaching at the GC. The charade would continue a little longer…

As a musicologist who spends most days trying to sort out whether to devote her life to playing piano or writing about music, but knows that however it turns out, contemporary music is going to play a pretty big role, Music10 sounded pretty irresistible: go to Switzerland, play a bunch of contemporary music, and try to find out exactly what is on young composers’ and performers’ minds.

Let the great experiment begin!

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